At Veritas Vision 2017, I had a fantastic conversation with Manvinder Singh, Head of Strategic Partnerships, Cloud Storage, Data, and Analytics at Google. We discussed Veritas’ partnership with Google and where that relationship will evolve in the future. Listen to our full conversation in Episode 07: Cloud Vision with Veritas and Google
Veritas and Google’s Shared Vision about Multi-Cloud
One of the areas Veritas has been working with Google is continuing to broaden our support for multi-cloud environments. I asked Manvinder why Google is so bullish on multi-cloud, and he answered: “For the next ten or fifteen years, we believe enterprises will be operating in a hybrid cloud fashion with workloads that are both on-premise and in the cloud. Our shared vision with Veritas is that enterprises need to manage their data, regardless of where it’s located, while having complete visibility.”
Our partnership with Google has already born some great integrations such as 360 Data Management for the Google Cloud Platform which utilizes Google Cloud Storage as a backup destination including archiving data for eDiscovery and compliance and performing disaster recovery to or from the Google Cloud Platform. This approach helps enterprises retain control, move workloads, and stay compliant across clouds.
One of the conference’s major themes was realizing the true value of secondary data. We find that many enterprises often look at the cloud as a cheap storage option and don’t understand that their archived data is a potential gold mine of information. In fact, to illustrate this point, we used a Walking Dead image in the conference’s keynote speech with the tagline “Where Data Goes to Die.”
Manvinder agreed and discussed how Google helps unlock that value. “Our focus isn’t on leaving your data in cheap archival storage so it turns into a data graveyard. We want to help you realize there’s a lot more that you can do with it. For instance, let’s say you need to find specific real estate contracts from the last five years. To do that, you can take your data from NetBackup into Google Cloud Storage and spin up an elastic search cluster. In the catalog, you can look for files by filename and run a full-tech search inside the file itself.”
Utilizing Rich MetaData
I mentioned to Manvinder that it’s interesting how metadata has typically been used in very passive ways. For instance, a file has to be lost for us to use the metadata in the catalog to get it back, and it’s a similar process if a server fails before we can recover it. But our vision is to enable a more proactive approach by using metadata to do new and more innovative things. Our partnership with Google is bringing that vision to life, because Google can help take that context data and influence our decision making in new and interesting ways.
Manvinder agreed, “Yes, metadata is gold, isn’t it? If you’re capturing metadata in systematic ways, what you can do with it is limitless. When you’re performing analytic services or machine learning on core, unstructured data, your metadata is, in some ways, more important than the actual data blocks. We have over 60 services in Google Cloud platform that enable using metadata.”
Evolution of a Partnership
My closing question to Manvinder was how he sees the Veritas and Google partnership evolving. “You have a lot of new products in the pipeline and it’s been amazing to see some of them like Cloud Storage, CloudPoint, and Access,” he said. “We have our work cut out to build integrations to Veritas’ amazing products.”
We’re also excited about how this partnership will evolve including developing more product integrations and certifying Veritas products on the Google Cloud platform. Learn more about the partnership here: https://www.veritas.com/solution/google-cloud-platform
Listen to the Podcast
Visit iTunes to listen to this ‘Voice of Veritas’ podcast, “Episode 07: Cloud Vision with Veritas and Google” for more insights into how Veritas and Google are working together to support multi-cloud environments.
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